Center for Obviousness Study: “Daily Show” funny, focused on politics
From Huffington Post:
NEW YORK — A journalism think tank studying “The Daily Show” doesn’t believe many people get their news from Jon Stewart _ because otherwise they wouldn’t get the jokes.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism also said it was surprised at how much the Comedy Central late-night program resembles “The O’Reilly Factor,” “Hardball” and other cable news shows in content.
The Washington-based organization asked its researchers to study a year’s worth of “The Daily Show” tapes _ hardly a grim assignment _ after hearing the frequent claim that many young people learn about the world from Stewart instead of more traditional news sources.
Tom Rosenstiel, the project’s director, said he doubts this is the case. He considers “The Daily Show” more of a political satire in the tradition of newspapermen like Art Buchwald, H.L. Mencken and Russell Baker.
“They’re not making jokes about Dan Quayle is dumb or Gerald Ford is clumsy,” he said. “They’re not making jokes that you could get if you live in the country but don’t read the news … . You can’t get the jokes if you’re not watching the news. The jokes are designed to make you think more about the news.”
Speaking from experience, never doubt a journalist’s ability to waste time. Seriously, they studied a year’s worth of Daily Show and came to the conclusion that the show is a satire of the news. Exactly how far was it into the year that they came to that conclusion? I’m guessing mid-March.
The Huffington Post put this article up under the headline “‘Daily Show’ Very Similar to ‘O’Reilly Factor,’” which admittedly piqued my interest. And how, exactly, are they similar?
Politics, government and the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq accounted for about half of the show’s content, making it quite similar to the focus of serious cable news shows, the study said.
Quite the observation: the content of a satirical news program resembles that of actual news programs. Excuse me while I collect the bits of my mind that have blown out the back of my head.
I did learn something from reading about this study, though: Apparently, The O’Reilly Factor is a “serious” cable news show. Who knew?
